Coaching for Success

Introducing eFIRE

Now you’ve had a chance to think about coaching, and its differences to other forms of WIL partner – student interaction, it’s time to identify how to engage in a coaching conversation. This topic presents a coaching model that can be applied to practically any WIL context, including teams. It includes examples of questions that can be asked to help students:

  • better understand the problems they are facing
  • identify realistic strategies to solve them
  • experiment with available options and develop action plans that consider the impacts of their execution.

Coaching, in practice, is essentially a formal conversation framework that helps a coach support the development of the coachee. In the context of Work Integrated Learning (WIL) relationships, a WIL partner would be considered the coach, and the student(s) would be considered the coachee. The coaching model introduced in this module is called eFIRE. eFIRE is described as a non-linear model of coaching that is designed to enable conversations to go beyond surface-level issues (Abbott, 2016) to activate changes in behaviour, in line with Boyatzis’ (2006) Intentional Change Theory. The eFIRE model consists of five distinct modes of conversation:

  1. energy
  2. Framing
  3. Inquiring
  4. Reflecting
  5. Executing/Experimenting
Diagram of four intersecting circles, each representing a phase of the eFIRE coaching model. The coloured circles are labelled: Frame (yellow), Inquire (blue), Reflect (orange), Experiment and Execute (green) with energy at the centre of all four.
eFIRE has been developed by Geoff Abbott, Director of Executive and Organisational coaching at QUT Graduate School of Business. © QUT Graduate School of Business